At 60 M.P.H., Office Work Is High Risk

David Vered, an entrepreneur, checked his e-mail for 10 seconds while cruising at 45 m.p.h. in light traffic in California. Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

JOPLIN, Mo. — Looking back, Paul Dekok wonders what he was thinking that May morning when the urgent call came in. Mr. Dekok, a manager at the Potash Corporation, learned that a 25-ton truckload of the company’s additive for livestock feed had been rejected by a customer as contaminated.

Scrambling to protect his company’s credibility with a big customer, he grabbed his cellphone to arrange a new shipment, cradling it between his left ear and shoulder, and with his right hand e-mailed instructions to his staff from his laptop computer — all while driving his rental car in a construction zone on a two-lane highway in North Carolina.

“I thought I was doing a great job because I was being productive,” Mr. Dekok said. “It’s an adrenaline rush. It’s the buzz we all get of trying to do everything you can in business.”

But later, reflecting on the risks he took that spring day in 2007, he saw himself in a different light: “I was Bozo the clown.”

Mr. Dekok may be rethinking how he works on the road, but tens of thousands of Americans barely give it a second thought. They have turned their cars, vans and trucks into mobile offices, wired with phones and computers to stay in close touch with bosses and customers.

On Wednesday, the Transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, called the broader phenomenon of distracted driving a “deadly epidemic” at a meeting on the issue in Washington. Real estate brokers, pharmaceutical sales people, entrepreneurs, marketers and others say they have little choice but to transform their cars into cubicles. In this merciless economy, they say, they have to make every minute count, and respond instantly to opportunities and challenges.

And they argue that the convenience of constant contact — and the chance to tick off items from an endless to-do list while driving — far outweigh what they think are slim chances that it could lead to a wreck.

For white-collar employees, pressures to multitask are largely self-imposed. For blue-collar workers, the demands to stay connected while driving are often imposed by their bosses.

Truckers, plumbers, delivery drivers and others are tethered to dispatchers with an array of productivity devices, including on-board computers that send instructions about the next job and keep tabs on drivers’ locations. Such devices can require continual attention — distracting drivers who are steering the biggest vehicles on American roads.

The compulsion to work while driving often trumps clear evidence that such activity is dangerous. Studies show that someone who talks on the phone while driving is four times more likely to crash, even using a hands-free headset, than someone who is simply driving. The risks are even greater when sending text messages.

For all the perceived benefits of multitasking behind the wheel — like staying a step ahead of competitors — the dangers have begun to take their toll on companies, leading some to ban the practice by employees.

Some families of victims killed in collisions with a multitasking worker have successfully sued the driver’s employer for tens of millions of dollars.

Researchers say there is another reason to question the benefits of working behind the wheel: a growing body of research shows that splitting attention between activities like working and driving often leads to distracted conversations and bad decisions.

“There is an illusion of productivity,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “It’s actually counterproductive.”

“To the extent that someone is focused on driving, the quality of work product is diminished,” he added. “To the extent someone is focused on work and not driving, there’s a risk of crashing and burning. Something’s got to give.”

The Drive to Compete

Potash, a large public fertilizer and chemical company, never told managers like Mr. Dekok, or regional salesmen like Rob Hudson, that they needed to multitask while driving.

But given that both men drive an average of 150 miles each day visiting feed mills and other customers, their cars inevitably became rolling offices, the place where they call clients, plan meetings and make hotel reservations.

“I’d be on my cellphone, writing notes in my planner, driving with my knee, and with a sandwich in my lap,” Mr. Hudson said. He felt he could not ignore his phone, he said, because he never knew which call or e-mail message would be one he could not miss.

“For the clients, a lot of times it’s an urgent request for a delivery,” he said. “In the animal feed business, they never stop eating. It’s not like that can wait until tomorrow.”

Plenty of other workers feel similar pressures. IDC, a market research firm, estimated last year that there were 111 million mobile workers in the United States, including all manner of people who do work outside an office, whether in a car, café, or airport lounge. And in a 2007 survey, IDC found that 70 percent of owners of BlackBerrys and other smartphones used their device in a car at least once a week. (The survey did not specify whether the phone users were drivers or passengers, but 80 percent of people typically drive alone).

Mr. Ryan feels the pressure. He schedules work calls to make his own 45-minute commute — from Boston to Framingham, Mass. — more productive.

At stop lights, he checks texts and e-mail messages. He does not want to miss something important, but he also sees the practice as a time saver. “I might as well get a quick e-mail taken care of, or at least delete spam,” he said. “When I get to the office, I’ve saved 15 to 20 minutes of work.”

David Vered, 53, chief executive of Pacific Yogurt Partners, which operates Golden Spoon frozen yogurt stores in the San Francisco Bay Area and helps manage other stores around the state, sometimes does not wait for stop lights to check his e-mail.

He has trained employees to send concise messages so that he can read them while driving on the highway as he visits stores.

“With the BlackBerry, you can hold it up over the steering wheel,” he said. “I just hit ‘open’ and see what the issue is.”

On his lengthy commutes, he occasionally schedules calls with lawyers to do lease negotiations, or with contractors to discuss construction of a new retail outlet.

But his phone can also ring with an urgent problem, like a broken frozen-yogurt machine. Mr. Vered’s workers need to know what to do. If he delays, he said, they might be paralyzed, wasting time and money.

“I respond to them as rapidly as possible,” he said. “I don’t like holding people up. And I’m not just holding them up: I’m paying them. I want them to be as effective as possible.”

Studies show that drivers who send text or e-mail typically take their eyes off the road for an average of five seconds.

But Mr. Vered said he was vigilant about safety. Besides, he said, he never reads e-mail on his bigger laptop computer, which he keeps on a desk he has installed on the passenger seat of his small Toyota S.U.V.

“That’s dangerous because you have to shift the field of vision away from the road,” he added.

Mr. Vered said he was an adept multitasker.

“I’m in a zone,” he said. He uses a Bluetooth cellphone device attached to his ear so he can keep both hands on the wheel unless he is dialing or reading a text. “I’ve done it my whole life, so I know how to multitask,” he added.

As his own boss, Mr. Vered can choose whether to multitask while driving.

But other employees, particularly blue-collar workers, do not have that luxury. Many employers deploy an array of devices to stay connected with their drivers at all times.

The Mobile Office

“When someone’s toilet overflows, they call a bunch of plumbers — the first plumber there wins,” said Brian Edds, a marketing director for Xora, a company based in Mountain View, Calif.

Xora’s software lets workers using mobile phones receive dispatch and navigation directions, deal with payroll, fill out invoices and otherwise manage their work as if they were sitting at a desk.

IDC, the research firm, estimates companies spent $850 million last year for such software from Xora and its competitors, and estimated the market size would double in five years. The software has been installed on the phones of millions of electricians, service technicians, home health care workers, sales people, plumbers and others — at companies like Coca-Cola, Merck, Pitney Bowes and Xerox, and the city of Chicago.

Xora’s customers include the Roto-Rooter Services Company, the plumbing chain.

In the past, Mr. Edds said, a mobile worker might have had to scribble down directions from a dispatcher.

“Now he gets sent the information in an organized manner, so he can click on the address, and get the best route, so he gets to a job very fast,” he said.

Stephen R. Poppe, chief information officer for Roto-Rooter, said that when employees turned on their device, it warned them not to use it while driving. But employees can bypass the warning, and Mr. Poppe conceded the company cannot stop them from doing so,

Last year, International Paper reached a settlement to pay $5.2 million because of a 2006 accident in which an employee on a phone hit another driver, whose arm had to be amputated.

Katherine McArthur, a lawyer in Macon, Ga., who sued International Paper in that case, said the company permitted employees to use a cellphone while driving if it had a hands-free headset. (This remains the company policy, according to International Paper).

But Ms. McArthur said that several studies show that drivers using headsets face the same likelihood of crashing as someone holding the phone to their ear. That risk has been compared to driving at the legal limit for intoxication.

“What I’m arguing in these cases is that these companies are authorizing something as bad as drunk driving and that they knew about the research or should have known,” she said. Ms. McArthur said that companies should expect more such lawsuits.

“They’re the deep pockets,” she said. Some may pay before an accident even happens. Insurance executives say that when setting premiums the industry has started to consider whether companies have policies on cellphone use.

The Calculus

There might be another reason for drivers to reconsider working behind the wheel: a growing body of studies suggest that such work may be less valuable than many people assume.

The reason, researchers say, is that the brain can effectively perform only one difficult task at a time.

Mr. Meyer, the Michigan professor, found that when someone tried to multitask, important neural regions must switch back and forth, taking time and creating inefficiencies.

That can be particularly dangerous, of course, when a driver suddenly feels the tires slipping on an icy road in the middle of a phone call. But that 2001 study, and numerous others, also show that multitasking motorists can pay another price — in the quality of their work.

In 2006, for instance, researchers at University of California, Los Angeles, used brain imaging to show that multitaskers were less effective learners.

According to that research, a person focused on a single task remembers what he has learned using the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical to storing and recalling information.

But when that person multitasks — like trying to learn something new while driving — the brain relies more on the striatum, a part of the brain used more for learning motor skills.

The researchers concluded, “Don’t multitask while you are trying to learn something new you hope to remember.”

“The brain is fundamentally built to unitask,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, where he is also a co-director of a new automotive research laboratory.

That limitation can put drivers at a disadvantage if they are negotiating with someone who, say, is in an office and less distracted.

Driving, Mr. Nass said, taxes the parts of the brain that make it more difficult to appreciate nuances of a conversation. “A person is much more manipulatable when they’re behind the wheel,” he said.

Mr. Nass said that the counterproductive effects can linger after the ride. Research shows that the brains of heavy multitaskers can become so accustomed to hopping from task to task that they have trouble focusing on longer, more in-depth ones.

Some companies have weighed several factors — including the safety risks and the cost of potential lawsuits — and banned employees from doing work on their phones behind the wheel. (In a survey taken in August of its 13,000 member companies, the National Safety Council found 469 with such bans.)

Some corporations that have imposed the bans have found that productivity has not suffered.

AMEC, an international engineering and project management company, banned its 9,000 North American workers, starting in 2005, from talking on the phone while driving — a decision the company made after executives heard about a fatal accident caused by a driver talking on a cellphone.

AMEC surveyed its workers a year later, asking them to respond anonymously to encourage candor, and 95 percent said their productivity had not been affected.

In 2004, Exxon Mobil started asking the same question after it became concerned about the safety of its 90,000 workers and 100,000 contract workers, who drove up to 1.5 million miles each day, said Michael Henderek, the company’s safety executive at the time. The company wanted to know what a ban would do to the bottom line.

“Exxon Mobil is a corporation in which 50 percent of employees are engineers,” said Mr. Henderek. “It’s driven by data.”

The company determined that research equating the dangers of behind-the-wheel multitasking with drunken driving was reliable. So in early 2004, Exxon Mobil ran a pilot project, restricting some employees from using the phone while driving. It found no loss in productivity, and quickly imposed a ban for all workers and contractors.

“To not act was irresponsible,” Mr. Henderek said. “The risk to employees was much greater than any marginal benefit of the productivity you get.”

Exxon Mobil was particularly concerned about its big fuel trucks.

“The last thing you want to have,” Mr. Henderek said, “is an incident between the fuel fleet and the community.”

Tragedy Begets a Change

Last March, Potash’s chief executive, William J. Doyle, attended a conference in Bahrain that focused on safety in the fertilizer industry.

He was particularly moved by a harrowing speech — not about chemical safety, but distracted driving. Before day’s end, Mr. Doyle had sent an e-mail message to several Potash executives telling them the company needed to change its policy.

“It said, ‘We have to get a cellphone policy in place. We can’t subject people to this anymore,’ ” John Hunt, Potash’s executive in charge of safety, health and environment, recalled.

On April 1, Potash banned its 5,000 workers from using their phones while driving, telling them they could be fired if they broke the rule. “There’s always an extra 15 or 30 minutes where someone can pull the car over to place a call. Nothing is that critical,” Mr. Hunt said, explaining the policy.

Mr. Dekok, the manager, was skeptical. But his grudging acceptance vanished when he heard a speech by David Teater, an executive with the National Safety Council, which has made a cause of eliminating driver distraction.

This year, as part of that, the group began an effort to get corporations representing one million workers to ban their employees from using cellphones while driving.

At the invitation of Potash, Mr. Teater, 53, a former college football player with an easygoing manner, recently gave company workers and their families a version of the stump speech he has given dozens of times.

Over 40 minutes, Mr. Teater detailed the increased risks drivers face when multitasking. He talked about cognitive distraction and the need for stronger laws. He thanked Potash for being a leader and urged the audience to tell others to rethink their priorities.

“We don’t need our phones as much as we think we do,” he said.

Then Mr. Teater, his audience already rapt, showed pictures on a projector of people who had been killed by multitasking drivers.

The last photo he showed was of a 12-year-old blond boy, smiling — it was Joe Teater, Mr. Teater’s son.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2004, a driver talking on a cellphone on her way to church hit the Teaters’ car, killing Joe and injuring his mother, who was driving. (After his son’s death, Mr. Teater worked 18 months for a company that is developing technology that can prevent a driver from using a cellphone while the car is in motion, and he still owns shares in the company.)

Many of the Potash employees teared up as Mr. Teater concluded. They thanked him, and said they would change their behavior and urge friends and family to do the same.

Mr. Hudson, the Potash salesman, still wishes there could be some compromise on the policy. He acknowledged that he has had more than a few scary moments in the past when he’s “swerved off the beaten path” while multitasking. But he still feels drive time should be productive.

“You’d think we could have some leeway on the highway — when you’re on open road and you’re wide awake,” he said. “It’s a little over the top to have a 100 percent ban. But then, where do you draw the line?”

For Mr. Dekok, the line is now clear. If he is driving and the phone rings, he lets it go to voicemail. He knows every rest stop on his routes, and which ones have good cellular and Wi-Fi service.

He does not drive more than 30 miles without stopping to respond to messages. And he delegates more authority to subordinates so they can deal with problems when he is on the road.

Business is just as urgent as it always has been, but he has a new view of the calculus.

“After you go cold turkey, and get rid of the cellphone when you drive, you see other people’s behavior,” he said. “It’s like getting sober and realizing everyone else is still drunk.”

Correction: October 3, 2009

An article on Thursday about the hazards of multitasking while on the road for business misstated, in some editions, the given name of the daughter of Samantha Earnest, whose son Jason was killed when their car was hit by a delivery truck whose driver was operating a computer. Mrs. Earnest’s daughter is Hailey, not Dawn. The article also rendered incorrectly in some editions part of the name of the company that employed the driver. It is the Ada Coca-Cola Bottling Company, not ADA. Because of an editing error, a picture caption with the continuation of the article also misstated the job title for Paul Dekok, whose company, Potash, has banned the use of cellphones in company cars. He is a manager, not the general manager.

Articles in the Driven to Distraction
series examine the dangers of
drivers using cellphones and other
electronic devices and efforts to
deal with the problem.

A version of this article appears in print on October 1, 2009, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: At 60 M.P.H., Office Work Is a High-Risk Job. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe